Tuesday, December 2nd ‘My Home’ went all the way and won the prestigious People’s Choice Award in the Envision category. All of us at Hello are very proud of being part of this success and thank Elsparefonden (The Danish Electricity Saving Trust) for letting us do the job.
The ‘My Home’ interface is a rich internet application (RIA) with features that allow consumers to reduce their carbon footprint while saving money on their energy bills. Created with Adobe’s advanced programming technology, ‘My Home’ creates a virtual power meter that monitors consumer’s personal habits and provides real-time analysis of where they can make changes and how to make them. It easily identifies energy-hog appliances and recommends small changes that add up to big energy savings. This core function, electricity monitoring and advise, is coupled with green focused home automation to enable remote monitoring and control of the home’s appliances and lighting. The entire system makes use of Z-Wave compliant devices, home appliance data, address information and user input to create a managed electricity savings environment.
Consumers are presented with a well designed Flex Use Interface and are walked through a series of setup steps where they can use a Sketch-Up like tool to create their virtual home, drop appliances into this virtual home and setup home automation network elements to create a comprehensive Electricity monitoring and control application. Once application setup is complete, users will begin to receive tips about which parts of their lifestyle, or which appliance choices will serve best in helping to achieve maximum electricity savings. Daily and ongoing consumption is continuously monitored with data provided to users in clear charts and graphs that indicate where the best electricity savings may be obtained.
When combined with Z-Wave Automation gateways the ‘My Home’ Flex application allows users to make intelligent choices about when to turn on their radiator or to change their lighting usage remotely or according to a schedule. This control gives consumers the lifestyle convenience of home automation while striving to achieve lower electricity consumption. If a consumer goes on holiday and forgets to turn off the lights or radiator, no problem. They can simply log in to ‘My Home’ from their iPhone, look at streaming video of the house, turn off unneeded lights and turn down the radiator.
By using this intuitive personalized application the consumers of Denmark will provide an example for the rest of the world to build energy conservation directly into their daily lives in an intelligent and cost effective way.
With this green tech application, the Adobe Flex team at Hello Group beat out hundreds of other entrants for inclusion in the final round of the prestigious Adobe MAX 2008/2009 awards.
About Elsparefonden
Elsparefonden (The Danish Electricity Saving Trust) was established by law in December 1996 as an independent fund with its own board, and activities within the guidelines of the law and related provisions. The fund compiles an action plan every year based on conditions from the Danish Energy Authority. The fund’s purpose is to promote electricity conservation in homes and the public sector in accordance with social and environmental targets. Its tasks include implementing the goals of the energy policy to make it simple, safe and cheap to be energy-efficient. It has been remarkably successful, with over ten billion Danish kroner worth of electricity saved to date.
About Adobe and the MAX Awards
For more information about Adobe Rich Internet Applications please visit http://www.adobe.com/resources/business/rich_internet_apps/
For more information about the Adobe MAX 2008 conference please visit http://www.max.adobe.com